The Most Dangerous Vacation Ever Taken
by The Kat Valentine
Summary: -AU, post-Chosen- After being pushed over the edge in a house full of mini Slayers, a depressed Faith and a series of Scoobies who just don't get it, Buffy takes off after an argument with Faith. And, as the crew, they follow... all the way to NYC.
1. Truth Between Slayers

And it all started with a jar of peanut butter.

It was the crunchy kind, Buffy's favorite. The stuff was chocked full of peanuts and, for Faith Lehane, death. When they'd had to take her to the emergency room because her throat had swollen almost completely closed, the entire crew had panicked and Giles' snide remark was how an apocalypse had not killed a Slayer, but a jar of sandwich spread almost had. She was returned safely to their fairly large Cleveland residence by mid-afternoon and Buffy called to order an immense 'family meeting'.

"Who mixed the JIF with the Skippy?" Buffy asked, and she was holding up the offending jars of the stuff while all the teenagers looked on. Buffy was the principal, and they'd all been called in for cutting classes, cheating on tests, accidentally incurring an allergic reaction on Miss Lehane. "You all know Faith's allergic. Who did it?"

Truth be told, it'd been Kennedy who committed the dire indiscretion, but she wasn't about to say anything. She and the brunette she'd become slight buddies with, Rosemary, exchanged glances and Rosemary spoke up quickly, "There was, like, none of the JIF left and I didn't wanna put the empty jar back in the fridge so I globbed it in with the Skippy. I—I'm really sorry, Faith."

Faith's surprising calm was rooted in the fact that she'd been halfway traumatized by the morning's events and she didn't feel like herself again just yet. She hadn't had a reaction since her first trip to Sunnydale when Joyce had fed her the oatmeal-peanut-butter cookies she had neglected to mention contained peanut butter. Of course, because her luck was as good as a Lehane's could get, then the reaction hadn't been as bad as it was earlier. And now, there she was, sitting on the couch still itching like a hundred mosquito bites and hardly able to talk. And man, was she ever irritated.

She would admit, she was startled that Buffy was putting up this kind of deal for her. It felt, almost, like she and the older Slayer were never on good terms, no matter what. There was no level of acceptance that was going to get Buffy to fully forgive Faith and, somehow, she knew that. She wasn't going to earn it, anyway. When you were as self-righteous as Buffy Summers was, there was no winning.

Faith waved a hand resolutely and Buffy sighed. For a moment Faith wondered if anyone else saw the agitation on the Chosen First's face. It wasn't painfully obvious, but it was clearly there. Maybe, she figured, she should talk to her—

Perish that thought immediately.

* * *

It ate away at Buffy more than any of them could understand. It was the prospect of being alone, a home she no longer had, and things she just couldn't deal with. She was too old to be able to whine about it, she recognized that, but some nights she couldn't sleep while she remembered. It haunted her worse than anything, though, because she'd never be able to visit her mother's grave again.

Sunnydale was half a war-zone, unrecognizable in every respect. Even the old welcome sign had been destroyed. Houses, trees, people, pets, life itself had gone down when they defeated The First.

"You and Angel, you're both damn good at that quiet broody dig." There was something unsure about Faith's voice that Buffy couldn't place. Eggshell walking, much?

"You're one to talk," Buffy responded, albeit with a touch of venom. Faith caught it, but she didn't have a touch of an urge to retaliate. A little bitter birdie in her ear tweeted out how a younger Faith would have smirked and returned the lash. "You've been playing a lot of the disappearing act lately. You okay?"

Now that she was no longer horrendously itchy and her tongue was not the size of a continent, Faith had to come to terms with the necessity to talk. So she offered a quiet nod and dropped herself onto the roomy loveseat in their old-lady-upholstered living room (leave it to the stuffy Brits to decorate badly and then make them live in it. Dusty, stained glass lamps, everywhere…) She wouldn't dignify it with a response, the gesture would suffice. Although, there was that irritation on B's face again.

She cut her off at the pass before Buffy's mouth could open. A question was not needed, "What about you, B? Ain't been your usual sunshiney self."

The Rogue Slayer was hunting relentlessly for a cigarette when Buffy spoke, and she'd finally found one salvaged in the crushed pack. It was the last one she had. Kennedy kept bumming them when she wasn't looking in some attempt to imitate her. It was cute, but Faith wasn't keen on the concept.

"I was just… thinking, you know? I miss Sunnydale a lot, and—"

"Place needed to go, anyways." Faith muttered, and finally managed to light her cigarette. Her Harley Davidson Zippo had been one of the things lost in the great destruction of Sunnydale. She mourned its passing with this pathetic BIC she couldn't stand.

The blonde Slayer curled up a bit tighter into thin, red blanket she'd wrapped herself in. Her clear, ice-green eyes slid toward the other for a moment, "What about all those people we couldn't save? What about everything we lost? That was my _home_, Faith."

An instinct told Faith to stop arguing, to crawl back inside herself, but something else said to keep going. She figured it might have been the boldness of the cigarette, "If we all kept worryin' about everyone we couldn't save, we'd never quit killing ourselves over it."

"It's easier for someone to say who's killed people before." Faith flinched. She'd been dealt that low blow twice, and both times it hurt like an ice pick through the heart. It was unfair, but nonetheless she let it go. Buffy was far more harsh than she was, Faith Lehane had been debarked. "You can't just let everything roll off your back."

She didn't want to have this conversation, honestly, not even in the least. She wanted to let everything go and quit fighting like Buffy insisted, and she figured it could be a thousand different things. It could be B's relentless need to coax a rise out of her so they'd butt heads, it could be the Chosen first's way of marking territory, but Faith knew she was just too damn tired.

"Sure I can. Watch me." She said coolly, and took the longest drag off the cigarette she'd ever felt. "Shit happened, B. Don't let it eat you. It's not like you said 'oh, let's vaporize this town'."

"You have no heart." Buffy murmured, and Faith's chocolate-colored gaze darted swiftly out the window to the night sky, unwilling to look as wounded as that statement had made her. It wasn't that she didn't have a heart; it was that Buffy was missing the warrior gene, the survival gene, the life goes on gene. This was Faith's way of saying 'drop the baggage'. Only that wasn't going to happen, because Buffy could oftentimes be worse than her. Well, not really, it had just seemed to be lately.

"You shouldn't beat yourself up over it." She was trying, but it was as failed and lame as a horse with a broken leg. In spite of the defeat written all over her face, Buffy said only one thing before heading upstairs.

"One of us has to. You sure don't, _F."_


	2. The Certainty of Guilt

They'd searched the place upside-down.

She wasn't upstairs brushing her hair, she wasn't downstairs talking to the little Slaylings, and she wasn't anywhere to be found. Faith noted this when she trotted into Buffy's room to offer an awkward, beaten apology and she couldn't even do that. There was no one to apologize to.

It was just around noon they all started to get worried, because they figured maybe she'd gone to get bagels or something in that area. This couldn't be the case because it was getting well into lunchtime, and it didn't take this long to get breakfast. Either Buffy was baking the bread herself or she was long gone.

And out of everyone in the household discussing this issue, Faith was undoubtedly the antsiest. It was because of, one could easily figure, guilt. She would admit that she could be insensitive… nasty… impolite… okay, all of the above, but these days she didn't let it go without apology. She'd learned life was too short and too perilous to go to bed angry. Or was it to wake up angry? Whatever.

"You're gonna wear a hole across the linoleum." Xander pointed out wisely, gesturing to Faith's endlessly moving feet. Of course, she ignored him completely and went on scuffing the kitchen floor with her boots.

"Oh—a locator spell," Willow squeaked, suddenly stricken by this concept, and both their heads turned to understand what was happening. Faith looked perplexed, which was followed by good ol' Xander's confused puppy sound. The pacing stopped, momentarily, and Faith whirled a chair around from the kitchen table to straddle it, feet solidly pressed into the ground on either side. Xander swore that if she squeezed the headboard of the thing any tighter it would splinter off.

"She's in Pennsylvania," Willow blurted suddenly, and simultaneously Xander and Faith were up from their seats. Pennsylvania? What the hell was she doing in _Pennsylvania?_ This was Faith's exact and almost immediate sentiment. This made _no sense at all._

"—B-But she's moving!" Willow interjected. The look on Xander's face was enough to make her panic.

"Why is she movin'? I don't get it, that's not like Buff."

In the most sinking sensation in the pit of Faith's stomach, the dark Slayer almost immediately knew.

This was her fault.

She couldn't do this anymore, she had immediately decided. After fighting with Faith about it, it was too much. She knew the first time she'd done it had been a bad idea, but this was different. This was more stress than she could handle; for goodness sake, there was a house full of underage baby Slayers who counted on her every move. Maybe Faith had been right, maybe she did need to forget about it. Maybe Faith needed to play top dog for a while.

Buffy marveled at how frigid the state was. Snow was something she hadn't seen since the incident with Angel, and thinking about it felt millions of worlds away. She shuddered when the cold stuff fell on her cheek and touched at it, noticeably bothered. Now that she'd had a sufficiently large cup of coffee she could keep on moving.

Her method of transportation was none other than Faith's 1970 Chevy Chevelle, a car she'd procured used on a 'Slayer salary', as they'd gotten fond of calling it, along with the list of mechanical problems it came with. It was old, had been ill taken care of by its previous owner and the payments were never on time because Faith couldn't hold down a steady job for more than a month. She was too sporadic to stay in one place. She got stir crazy easily, like an impatient child. Robin Wood found that out quickly when she told him she couldn't see _just him, like, ya know, datin' and that shit. _

At this thought, Buffy rolled her eyes and climbed into the half-gnawed driver's seat of the old thing. It sputtered to a start with a slow, painful grind and she stared blankly at the road ahead, feeling deader than she had in a very long time.

In those moments, mulling over the road before her, a thousand thoughts began to stew in her head. She knew this wasn't the right thing, but was this the acceptable thing?

She shook her head quickly, her thin, golden bangs falling into her eyes. No. It was something she _had_ to do. She had to disappear, if only for a while, had to maintain an ultimate form of anonymity. She had to go to a place where no one knew her name, where not a soul would ever be able to find her. Her last mistake had been that she didn't go far enough to gain that disappearance. She'd thrown a half-assed pitch and paid for it with homesickness she couldn't put out. She needed distance, real distance, and the kind that wouldn't let her run on back with her tail between her legs.

She wasn't thinking of the wrath she would face when Faith found her baby gone from the driveway. The Chevelle was their only car, with the exception of Xander's, and Xander's too often refused to start at all. This posed a problem when they all worked in different places and needed to be in all of them at the same time. This was mortally impossible, and they were laying low on the usage of spells so they often worked around each other's schedules and occasionally 'borrowed' (In Faith's vocabulary, anyway) Giles' tremendously sweet convertible.

As the radio kicked into a Whitesnake tune (_Here I go again on my own, it sang, leaving Buffy with a sense of sufficient sadness, a slight pang)_, she dropped her foot from the brake to the gas and slid the gearshift into drive. This Slayer, she had decided, was New York bound.


End file.
